[jjp]

From your follow-on comments I'm not sure whether the challenge for you is finding problems or identifying that it's a problem that is worth working on. Providing a little more information on the sort of problems you have seen and then why you have decided to not work on them would help others be more specific with their guidance.

[pigpigs]

I think that problems will obviously need to resonate with enough people for a startup to even exist.

As a recent graduate, honestly I have not experienced many of the industry pain points, and am limited to the really general food delivery, dating apps, edtech tools.

I did work on certain problems before. A group of us worked on a few versions of an MVP for an in-class active learning backchannel that many students & professors thought they needed. It was a complete disaster that ended with both sides realizing it was not a pain enough problem for them.

I also worked on a dating app that tried to solve a problem in my high school days. It allowed someone to anonymously send 'smooches' to their crushes, who would ideally see the email and sign up to do the same to their own crushes, alerting them of a match if they sent one to a person who sent to them. It was fun but didn't really get a lot of attention and traction.

Right now in a bit of an idea drought and don't know what to work on concretely.

[jjp]

Thoughts on how to push through

1. Pick an industry that you are either interested in and/or you believe is going to be more profitable - i.e. financial services pay more than retail therefore more potential.

2. Take a friend from University who works in that industry and not in technology to dinner, beer, coffee and find out what aspects of their job they find are the biggest PITA.

3. Read up what the management consultants are talking about. Not they should be considered gospel on problem or solution but if they are trying to sell something they believe there is a) problem that exists in that industry, b) there is a market for a solution and c) the industry is buying that solution.

4. Read up what your potential competitors are doing about the problem

5. Go to your thinking space (mines the movies) and noodle.

6. Compare your idea to the knowledge you've acquired in 2,3 and 4.

You can bail out at any point, you can do 1 through 4 in any order but do them before 5 and 6. You can be running multiple problems in parallel and you'll probably end up with ideas that coalesce. Then when you've got to step 6 make a decision about whether you're still interested in the problem, because now comes the hard work.